


Zugzwang

by Liara_90



Series: #Traynorweek2017 [2]
Category: Mass Effect - All Media Types, Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: Backstory, Canon Compliant, Chess, Chess Metaphors, Family Fluff, Gen, POV Female Character, POV First Person, Returning Home, Wordcount: 1.000-5.000
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-12
Updated: 2017-12-12
Packaged: 2019-02-14 01:48:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,955
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12997185
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Liara_90/pseuds/Liara_90
Summary: After several years away, Samantha Traynor returns home to Horizon. But things always have to keep changing.Written for the #Traynorweek2017 Day 2 Prompt: "Family".





	Zugzwang

* * *

Horizon Central Spaceport was a lot busier than I remembered it.

It’s a funny feeling, returning home for the first time in a while, isn’t it? Seeing what’s changed, what’s stayed the same… More the former than the latter, in my case, even if I’d only been gone a few years. New arrivals have been settling Horizon at what feels like an exponential rate. (Not _literally_ exponentially, of course, but still remarkably steep). When I’d left for Earth, back in ‘77, the Interplanetary Terminal had been practically deserted, only a few ships a week coming and going; the passenger lounges positively _cavernous_.

Horizon Central Spaceport in _2185_ , though: genuinely abuzz. Still not as bad as Heathrow or Arcturus, not by a longshot, but the whole place feels more alive. Bustling. _Different_.

Mum found me while I was waiting to collect my luggage. “Luggage” being an Alliance-blue duffel bag stuffed with twenty kilos of personal effects. My head was so focused on the carousel that I completely missed her until she was practically glomping me.

“ _Samantha_ , my dear, oh how I’ve missed you…”

Serving in the Alliance changed me a lot, I knew, probably more than I was willing to admit. It’s still a predominantly _macho_ culture - what army isn’t? - where gushy exchanges are generally frowned upon by steely-eyed men with buzz cuts. I’d become a bit more reserved, a bit more formal; I tried to tamper down my more emotional expressions.

The Alliance hadn’t changed me so much that I didn’t still tear up a bit.

“Hey Mum,” I said, wrapping my arms around her. “I missed you, too.” I squeezed her tight. “How’ve you been?”

‘ _Only been gone a few years_ ’. _My arse._

I collected my duffel, and we made our way to the parking complex, chatting all the way. The funny thing was there actually wasn’t all that much to get _caught up_ on. At least, when it came to The Big Things. I knew about how Mum’s work and Dad’s classes were going, how the neighborhood was changing and the pace of life quickening. Slowly but surely, the quiet colony my parents had settled on was vanishing.

“ _Oh_ ,” Mum said, as our air-taxi lifted off. “We got our first Chinese restaurant!”

I laughed. “That’s great, Mum. We should check it out.” (Secretly, Dear Reader, I was deading this prospect. Have you ever been to a small town that has exactly _one_ “ethnic cuisine” restaurant? Then you know why.)

The ride back was fairly quiet. My internal clock felt like it was three in the morning, and even with the dopamine reuptake inhibitor I’d taken I could feel the fatigue tugging at the backs of my eyeballs. But the flight back home really confirmed just how much Horizon had changed.

There were only a few hundred thousand settlers on Horizon, which meant that land was dirt-cheap and urban sprawl unchecked. The poorest settler could afford a prefabricated house that would constitute a _mansion_ back in England, spaced generously from their nearest neighbors. It was like in those old videos of the United States in the 20th century, with suburban sprawl that seemed to span Horizon’s horizon.

The planet was _changing_.

The taxi set us down outside our house. Dad hadn’t wanted to live in the capital, Discovery, because it had seemed too crowded for his tastes. Mum had thought him utterly _mental_ \- there were barely two buildings and a road back then - but we’d moved to one of the satellite settlements all the same. I’d grown up in a prefabricated house without a neighbor for miles. Now, what had once been my open backyard was a street teeming with new homes.

“How’s Dad doing?” I asked, as Mum paid the machine its fare. “His back okay?”

“It _is_ ,” Mum confirmed, “when he remembers to take his pills. Except most of the time he’s acting like your grandfather and always ‘losing’ them.”

I rolled my eyes a bit. I loved my Dad, but when he wanted to, he could be the ‘absent-minded professor’ that you’d think only existed in vids. “I’ll try to remind him,” I promised, as we exited the cab.

Mum made that high-pitched noise she makes when trying to gently discourage me from wasting my time.

I found Dad on the back porch, tapping idly away on his omni-tool. It was still early in the evening, and the sky was still its pale pink. He half-rose out of his chair as I made my entrance, but I hurried to hug him before he got too far up.

“Alpha sprog!” he chortled. (Yes, _chortled_ , that’s the verb and I’m sticking with it.) “The prodigal daughter returns.”

“Just wanted to get one last look at this colonial backwater before leaving forever,” I teased, taking a seat beside him. “Earth’s ruined me, I’m a posh city girl now.”

Dad snorted disapprovingly. “They’re fun when you’re a kid,” he stated, leaning back in his seat. “But when you want to start a family, you’re going to want some more _space_ , Sam.”

I rolled my eyes. “Yes, that _massive_ family I’m looking to make with the _wonderful_ Mister Godot I met at the theatre.”

Dad batted my words away, fiddling with a small box on the low table between us.

And just like that, we were playing chess.

“What color would you like?” Dad asked, laying a row of pawns. The pieces were small and wooden, millimeter-accurate replicas of the Lewis chessmen.

I shrugged. “I’ll take black,” I answered, setting down a rook and a knight. “Give you that _first-move advantage_ you so definitely need.”

Dad scoffed, continuing to set the pieces up in silence. After so long with only holographic GUIs to play with, there was something nostalgic about the _scrapes_ of wooden pieces on a physical board.

We started without preamble. Dad’s hand seemed to hover over a few pieces, before he advanced his Queen’s pawn two squares on the board. I countered by sweeping my kingside knight to f6.

_1\. d4 Nf6_

The holographic annotation appeared from my omni-tool. I belatedly realized that the auto-annotate function had kicked in, its sensors detecting a game and transcribing our moves accordingly.

Dad paused only for a second before bringing a second pawn shoulder-to-shoulder with the first. My kingside pawn advanced a square. He pulled out a knight, I toed a second pawn up.

_2\. c4 e6_

_3\. Nf3 b6_

“Queen’s Indian Defense?” Dad declared, in mock offense. “You wound me, my daughter.”

“Just play the damn game,” I grumbled.

And so we did.

While it’s unbecoming of a filial daughter, I have to admit that it’s been a long time since my Dad posed a real challenge to me. He used to be a titan in my eyes - I suppose all parents are, aren’t they? - as unbeatable as an AI. And he _was_ very strong, don’t get me wrong. That’s how he met Mum, incidentally, making pound sterling on the “London Pub Circuit”.

 _Pound sterling_ \- that certainly dates them, doesn’t it?

“So how much longer in your Alliance program?” Dad asked, as we exchanged pawns.

I blinked. “Two-and-half years, before my debt’s paid off.” My fingers hovered above my Queen. “Though I’ve told you I’m thinking of staying on.”

‘ _Thinking_ ’ was probably being a little generous. I spent a week bunking in the lab just to have unfettered access to the latest QEC prototype. I was hardly an _unwilling conscript_ at this point.

Dad _grunted_ in the negative to that, taking his time before choosing his next move. “You know they’re expanding the University of Northern Horizon.”

I tilted my head. “I think you mentioned that.”

He finally made his move, his own Queen retreating. “I might have. But I’ve heard in the staff lounge that they’re having difficulty finding faculty.”

“Can’t imagine why.” I inched up a pawn. Horizon’s not exactly the kind of planet up-and-coming academics go to make a name for themselves. And with the population base of a small town on Earth, they probably didn’t have a large pool of indigenous candidates to draw on. “Your move.”

“I’ll move when I’m ready,” Dad grumbled. “We’re not playing with a damn clock.” We played slowly, conservatively, whittling away at each other’s pieces. He was still quite sharp: probably the best Chess Master on Horizon (present company excluded).

“They’re looking for faculty in every department, you know,” he said, continuing a conversation I’d hoped we’d abandoned. “Mathematics, physics, comp sci…” I bit my tongue. “You can probably be a department head by the time you’re thirty.”

My fingers strummed the table. “I’ll think about it…”

“You could move back home…”

I kept thinking about the game.

_24\. Nb5 Nxb5_

_25\. Qxb5 Qe3+_

_26\. Kh1 g5_

_27\. Nh3 Bd3_

_28\. Rxf8+ Rxf8_

I have tens of thousands of lines like that, stored on my omni-tool. Dad started recording my games when I was five, and I’ve never broken the habit. They’re a few megabytes of text at most, but they contain _worlds_. Someone once compared it to reading baseball statistics in old print newspapers. I’ve only ever seen baseball for a statistical modelling class, but I think I know what he was getting at. I can pull up the first game I played at Oxford and recreate it with just those lines, visualizing the board in my head. I can see the mistakes I made, and how I pulled it back. And I can pull up games from when I was six, eight, ten, fourteen, tracking my own development. I can reenact the queen sacrifice that beat my father for the first time.

“ _Hm_.” Dad’s fingers hovered over two pieces. “I appear to be in zugzwang.”

 _Zugzwang_ \- for those of you who aren’t chess nerds like my family - comes from the German word for “ _compulsion to move_ ”. It’s when the pieces are so arranged that a player has literally _no_ good moves. But, of course, there is no staying still in chess.

The board has to keep changing... 

Dad eventually _did_ move, allowing me to capture a bishop and pretty much ending the game. Not literally, mind you, but if you play a few thousand chess matches you get a pretty good feel for when a player has an unassailable advantage.

I captured a pawn. “Check. And it’ll be _mate_ in four.”

Dad stared at the board, shaking his head slightly. He knew he was in trouble, but he still seemed to see a different endgame than I did. “What about if I…”

Mum swung the door from the kitchen open. “Samantha! I was just chatting with Ekta in Discovery and my signal completely died. Can you take a look at it?”

I sighed, Dad nodding in consent to my leave of the game. His eyes were still on the pieces, trying to puzzle out my last move.

“Coming, Mum,” I said, resignedly. Back on Arcturus I might be helping design the most advanced quantum entanglement communication system in the galaxy, but on Horizon, I’m still the girl you ask for help with your Extranet connection.

I collected my omni-tool, frowning as I noticed the little icon indicating its wireless connection was also severed. That probably meant it wasn’t anything I could troubleshoot - the telecommunications infrastructure on colony worlds is pretty spotty in the best of times. Someone probably drove over a cable on Discovery and knocked out the phones for half the planet.

From over Dad’s shoulder, I could see the first lights of the night twinkling into existence. Horizon had almost no light pollution, which was something about the planet I _did_ miss.

Dad was still staring at the board.

I looked at those stars and wondered what future they held.

**Author's Note:**

> Second entry for [#Traynorweek2017](https://www.tumblr.com/tagged/traynorweek2017). As always, feedback, reviews, criticisms, comments, etc., etc. are always appreciated. Feel free to hit me up on [reddit](https://www.reddit.com/user/pvoberstein/) or [Tumblr](http://www.pvoberstein.tumblr.com/).


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